Cross posted from Nature’s The Great Beyond blog.
Three clinical trials have been placed on hold after news broke that a researcher involved with the studies may have lied on his resume.
Cancer researcher Anil Potti of the Duke University School of Medicine has been placed on “administrative leave” pending an investigation into false claims, listed on applications for research funds, that he was a Rhodes Scholar. According to the New York Times, the American Cancer Society has also suspended payment of a $729,000 grant awarded to Potti based on an application that referenced the Rhodes scholarship.
The cancer trials aimed to test whether patterns of gene expression in tumours could be used to predict how those tumours respond to specific cancer drugs. Such predictions have been dreamt of since the earliest days of genome-wide gene expression analysis, and Potti and his coworkers appeared to take a significant step toward that goal in a 2006 Nature Medicine paper.